The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  Women will be pocket cunts, Lonzi said. Ideal for battle, for a light infantryman. Transportable, backpackable, and silent. You take a break from machine-gunning, slip them over your member, love them totally, and they don’t say a word.

  * * *

  What had actually been in Valera’s haversack: not a woman’s vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.

  The little gang all volunteered for assault regiments, the Arditi, and ended up in motorcycle battalions that engaged in advance-guard trickery along the Isonzo River. Lonzi was shot in the groin and had to return almost immediately from the front. Valera and Copertini ended up in the same squadron, before Copertini struck a tree and died. Valera rode his Pope, which he’d modified for war, welding on a machine gun rack and adding mudguards, a larger gas tank, rear panniers. Due to a shortage of the standard-issue Bianchi 500s, his Pope had been allowed and it was a good thing, because it was a hell of a lot faster than a Bianchi, since Valera had bored the cylinders. Quickness, as he discovered, was vital for remaining alive. War should be mobile, he felt, and it was not. Most soldiers were stuck in the trenches, waiting on death. While the cycle battalions of the Arditi raced along, flashing their white skull-and-crossbones chest patches as they pulled safety pins from grenades and dropped them. All Arditi, all on cycles, none in trenches. Still, in just two years, 1917 and 1918, half their little gang died.

  * * *

  The war over, one night he and Lonzi, recovered from his battlefront injury, were cruising between the Aqueduct of Nero and the Botanical Gardens when Lonzi hit a stone that must have rolled down from the Neronian ruins. Lonzi wrecked his cycle, shattering his wrist. Afterward, Lonzi felt that dumping his motorcycle because of a chunk of antiquity was a clear enough message that they should vacate Rome. (Despite his insistence on godlessness, Lonzi was always on the lookout for signs and symbols, and once Valera had seen him in the Piazza Navona, sitting at a flimsy card table with a palm reader. Lonzi’s eager posture, his open face, waiting and hoping to receive auspicious news from the woman and her cheap crystal ball, had embarrassed Valera so deeply that he repressed, for years, having witnessed this maudlin scene.)

  Shortly after Lonzi’s wipeout, the gang had a meeting at the Aragno and decided to head north. Rome was tumbling into creep and rot, with its mobs of tourists, its piles of garbage, its shabbily constructed slums encroaching from all sides as the economy bottomed out. Food shortages and unemployment and workers’ strikes were rampant. Italy had been all but ruined by its involvement in the war. Rome’s slum inhabitants were overrunning the city, zombie lumpen who seemed, to Valera and Lonzi, as if they were living in the Middle Ages, miserable people in faded black clothes, toothless by age twenty, stirring fires of scrap wood in oil drums to stay warm. For all they knew it was the year 800. The gang would make Milan (where most of them were from anyhow) their headquarters. Milan was not the capital, but it would be the capital of the new.

  To the north! Lonzi shouted, raising his mangled, plastered hand. To progress! he added, which is always right. It may be a traitor, thief, murderer, or arsonist, but it is always right.

  What had he meant? No one cared. They cheered.

  * * *

  They returned en masse, Valera, too, who vowed privately to out-Pope Pope, whoever he was, the American who had designed Valera’s bike, whose name meant “pope” in English, and Valera found this wonderfully funny, that some guy in America had the name Pope. He, Valera, would design the fastest, most unique and elegant motorcycle yet, and his father had pledged the money to put it into production if his prototype was a success.

  Milan was the same city Valera had experienced as a boy arriving from Egypt, but now the trams and their intricate overhead wires seemed beautiful. Neon was electric jewelry on the lithe body of the city, and he and the little gang were the marauders of this body. They zoomed over it, their engines roaring, their horns ricocheting against the high buildings along narrow lanes. The city was theirs, with all its metal and glass and auto traffic, its cranes and diggers and smokestacks. Lonzi talked of a future in which the city would be built to the size and scale of machines and not of men. Houses would be razed to make way for car racing and airplanes. Speed, Lonzi said, gives us, at last, divinity in the form of the straight line. We reject sluggish rivers and zigzagging humans and their flophouse designs! Lonzi said harebrained things about straightening the rivers of Europe, the Rhine, the Danube, the Po. The gang joined a racing club at a track on the wooded outskirts of Milan. They argued over the exact terms for the sensation of cornering, their motorcycles feeling as if they would split in two, accelerating out of turns as speed come to life, a violent but controlled surplus of itself. This was the difference between Valera and his gang. Valera was the only one with the training to conceptualize speed. The only one who truly appreciated the fine lubricated violence of an internal combustion engine, as he understood precisely how one worked. Valera spent his time designing his cycle and made plans to open a factory with his father’s backing. The others went to the track to race their cycles but less and less often, as they were too busy writing poems about motorcycle racing, busy making paintings of the velocity they’d felt. None was interested in generating actual speed: of putting a motor together, clamping it to a frame, filling its tank with gas, and riding the thing. Lonzi and the others scribbled poems that made the sounds of guns, while Valera was busy designing cycle mounts for actual guns. He himself never wanted to enlist in war again. But he saw money in designing the machines for it.

  Valera still pictured Marie on the back of that beastly crude bike built by Hildebrand & Wolfmüller of München. He had recovered from his youthful lust, her rabbit’s foot foot, his haversack keepsake. He was thirty-two years old and had experienced many other women by now, mostly for hire but some for free, and he couldn’t have cared less about Marie, understanding that she was, in any case, surely no longer the person he’d desired. Not burgeoning youth. Probably she’s squeezing out children, he thought, her big breasts heavy with milk. While I am changed only for the better. And still a lover of girls. Ready for Marie’s daughter, soon enough. Women were trapped in time. This was why men had to keep going younger. Marie’s daughter, or someone else’s. Because men, Valera understood, moved at a different velocity. And once they felt this, their velocity, all they had to do was release themselves from the artifice of time. Break free of it to see that it had never held them to begin with.

  6. IMITATION OF LIFE

  A month after the night I met the people with the gun and gave one of them my stolen Borsalino, I answered Marvin and Eric’s ad in the Village Voice. I wasn’t planning to. It had sounded so odd I’d read it out loud to Giddle, who was behind the counter at the Trust E.

  YOUR FACE AS UNIVERSAL STANDARD Young, good posture, good grooming, with rudimentary film knowledge, able to follow directions please apply.

  “You do have nice skin,” Giddle said, looking at me in an assessing way that made me blush.

  “But what is it?”

  “Modeling of some kind is my guess,” Giddle said.

  “You don’t think it’s nude, do you?”

  “Would you have a problem with that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t,” she said. “All kinds of things can happen in people’s lives. You can’t predict and you might as well keep your options open.”

  She went to take someone’s order.

  “Oh, cheer up,” she said when she returned. “I was kidding. I don’t think they want you to pose nude. That’s a legitimate film lab. I’ve heard of it.”

  Giddle offered to help with the good grooming part, and although it was a little condescending of her to presume I needed that sort of help, I was eager for friendship, and it was a next step. She came to my apartment bearing hot rollers, a hair dryer, and a small red vinyl suitcase filled with makeup. We had mostly been on either side of a counter from each other, and suddenly she was lea
ning over me, so close I could smell her perfume, cucumber oil that rubbed off on me and infused the whole experience of applying for the job with her smell. She separated portions of my hair with a fine-toothed comb and then rolled each section onto a hot roller and secured it with a metal clip. It felt ticklish and a little erotic to have her touching my scalp with the plastic teeth of her comb. But I think she forgot about me as she was doing this, lost deep in the act of transforming hair. Never mind whose hair, for what purpose. I ended up with a kind of beehive, all the stray hairs plastered like icing around the shape of the hive with aerosol spray. It wasn’t clear why I needed a beehive to apply for a job at a film lab, but that’s how it was with Giddle. She got lost in what she was doing, and practical questions were beside the point and in the wrong spirit.

  “You look so gay!” Giddle said when she’d finished my makeup and the final adjustments of my hair. In the word gay I suddenly saw Catherine Deneuve’s bright-colored raincoats and matching little dresses, her sad songs and delicate joy in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

  “I’m gay!” I said back. “Oh, so gay!” And I flew through my tiny apartment like a young girl in a French movie running to meet her lover and accidentally broke a cup. I paused to look in the mirror at the new, gay me. Giddle rushed in and drew a beauty mark near my mouth, painted more gloss on my lips with a brush, and blotted my face with a powder puff the size of a rat terrier.

  “Rice powder,” she said, “just a dusting.”

  It gave my skin a kind of moon glow, and my lips seemed redder. We looked at me in the mirror. Something had changed in my face, or in what I saw there. It wasn’t that I was prettier, exactly. It was that the whole charade of getting me ready to be looked at by whoever had placed that ad had exposed me to something. In myself. I looked at me as if I were someone else looking at me, and this gave me a weightless feeling, a buoy of nervous energy. I wanted to be looked at. I hadn’t realized until now. I wanted to be looked at. By men. By strangers. Giddle must have known.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Your chin cleft is showing—look, it’s so prominent!”

  I had never noticed I had a chin cleft, prominent or not.

  “It’s a sign,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “Luck,” she said. “There can’t be better luck.”

  I looked closer. There was a little depression in the center of my normally rounded chin. I had a chin cleft. It was showing. Maybe it was the powder but I think it was Giddle. She said the right kind of chin cleft was one that came and went, that you didn’t want a permanent cleft. It brought too much luck, and forced a terrible burden of joy on its bearer. Like Robert Mitchum, she said, who navigated a pussy wagon all over northern Mexico and drank paint thinner when he ran out of mezcal, and would be destroyed by his cleft. Too deep, she said. Too strong. Giddle had a cleft like mine, emerging only on certain days and in the right light, as I discovered, once I’d formed the habit of recognizing clefts. Hers was like a shallow thumbprint in dough. Those first few months as we became friends, I’d tell her that her cleft was showing and she’d lean over the chrome sandwich press on the rear counter of the diner to confirm the news, and then run off to buy lottery tickets or play a round of Fascination. If it was the end of her shift she’d throw on a black velvet jumper she kept in her work locker, daub oily swaths of cucumber scent on wrists and neck, fog her armpits with aerosol deodorant, and head uptown to the Carlyle. I figured Giddle was into businessmen. “Not how I’d put it, exactly,” she said, reaching into her bra to adjust each breast. She did have beautiful breasts. She was pretty, too, with large green eyes and a soft, pillowy mouth, even if her face was often creased with sleeplessness and her teeth were stained from tobacco, as were her fingers. Between her pointer and middle finger on her right hand was a yellow smudge of nicotine residue from her endless smoking.

  “It’s like what they don’t say in the movie version. I sleep with them, and they give me money, gifts, assistance with rent. It was supposed to have starred Marilyn, did you know? Marilyn Monroe and not Audrey Hepburn, who apparently would not touch the pastry to her lips in take after take outside of Tiffany’s. Marilyn loves a pastry and so do I, and she would have been a much better fit but it’s too late. It’s Audrey Hepburn who is the iconic thing you don’t name.”

  “You need the money?” I asked.

  “Yes, I need the money. I mean no, I don’t. It can’t be reduced to money. I can’t explain why I do it. It’s a kind of impulse.”

  At about that same time, I went to see a movie about a Belgian widow turned prostitute. I looked for signs in it of this occasional impulse of Giddle’s, but the film was all claustrophobic domesticity, a woman moving around an oppressively ordered space, shining her son’s shoes and making coffee in a percolator. Taking things out and putting them away. Opening cupboards. Closing cupboards. Dusting, polishing, whisk whisk whisk with a stiff brush over her son’s black shoes, as she prepared him for each samelike day wherever he vacated himself to, a technical university for vocational training on the other side of a series of metropolis gray zones, half-lit in dawns and dusks. The shoes, shined correctly, would pull them out of this. A situation that, perhaps like Giddle’s situation, didn’t pertain directly or exclusively to money. The bind the woman was in, or wanted to escape from (and never would), was a kind of trouble linked to women and Europe and Jews, not in an obvious way, but it was all there in the film, somehow: history, hatred, cleanliness, and the costs of survival, surviving while drowning, whisk whisk whisk as she shined the shoes. The ring of intimacy tightened after the son exiled himself for the day, and the apartment became the woman’s work space. She went into her bedroom and put a small threadbare towel over her bed’s coverlet in preparation for the arrival of a customer. A thin terry cloth layer between her two realities. As thin as the difference between a gesture that was dignified and one that was pathetic. Better, I thought, just to have one reality, to put everything on the same surface. To explain to the boy, almost a man, that money came from someplace, that she earned it the hard way, that there was no magical account at the Bank of Belgium. She was sorry there wasn’t, but more important, there wasn’t.

  So there I was with my beehive and my rice powder. Giddle grabbed me and steered me toward the front door of my apartment.

  “Go go go!” she cried. “You’ve got to go now, while your cleft is out!”

  * * *

  Marvin and Eric both wore welder’s glasses with thick, greenish prescription lenses, and they both snorted when they laughed. They ran a processing lab, Bowery Film, and after giving me the basic rundown of the job, mostly helping customers, answering the phone, restocking, they steered me to a pile of clothes that made me think of the term sportswear. You saw it on the second and third floors of department stores. It wasn’t clear what it referred to. Not athletics. The dresses Marvin and Eric gave me were knit, with big gold buttons. There was a sort of bathing suit made of a fabric that looked as if it were not meant to get wet. More like a baton twirler’s bodice, black velvet and rickrack. There were coffee-colored pantyhose in a plastic egg. They left me alone. I put on the hose and the black velvet bodice, which was the only garment that fit, because the others were all petite-sized, the shoulders too narrow, the sleeves too short. I stretched out on a white vinyl divan. Eric came in and moved a potted plant behind the divan.

  “Look down. Okay, look up. Left. Then right. Sit sideways but face front. Turn your head just slightly toward my hand, here, but follow the camera with your eyes. Yes. Exactly.”

  I would be looked at, but by people who didn’t know who I was. I would be looked at and remain anonymous.

  Every movie had what was known as a China girl on the film leader. The first one wasn’t Chinese. None of them were. No one was quite sure why they were called China girls, since they were a printing reference for Caucasian skin, there for the lab technicians, who needed a human face to make color corrections among various shots, stocks, and lig
hting conditions. If the curtains in a film looked tennis-ball chartreuse and not some paler shade of yellow, it made no difference to the viewer. There was no original set of curtains they needed to resemble. Flesh is different. Flesh needs to resemble flesh. It has a norm, a referent: the China girl. Curtains can be acid-bright but not faces. And if faces look wrong, we question everything. Some of the China girls smiled. Most stared into the camera with a faint, taut bemusement just under the surface of their expressions. Who knew I’d be a model? But here I am, modeling flesh tones.

  My own face, smiling shyly (who knew I’d be a model?), ended up on many films distributed in the United States and Canada. If the projectionist knew what he was doing, loaded the film properly and wound it past the leader, viewers did not see me. If they did see me, my face strobed past too quickly, leaving only an afterimage, like those pulsing colors that mosey across the retina after you stare at a lightbulb. Me then gone, me then gone. There might have been some unconscious effect, if you believed in that. Giddle often claimed the power of the subliminal. She said a voice whispered, “Do not shoplift. Do not shoplift . . . ,” over the PA system in her grocery store on Second Avenue, but so low it was not audible. It wasn’t clear to me how Giddle heard it if it wasn’t audible, except that Giddle was a shoplifter, and like dog whistles were meant for dogs, she was the intended audience.